03-18-2017, 02:28 AM
while collecting the stars, I connected the dots.
I don’t know who I am, but now I know who I’m not.
She is quiet beneath their eyes, stilled by the weight of their gazes when they trace the pathways of familiar hollows across skin that is smooth and bright and copper. When those eyes drift further, fall like shadow against the curve of a belly that is too full, too wide, it is reflexive to turn her face from them, to hide her uncertainty behind the curtain of her forelock, beneath the line of a mouth that wavers between smile and frown. But she can only hide away from them for so long and her eyes drift back to Leliana, soft and brown and always so beautiful, where she settles on a face that is, for once, unreadable. I don’t know who I am, but now I know who I’m not.
Exist’s face darkens with uncertainty, green eyes flashing like pale emeralds as she quickly tries to pick beneath the new layers of quiet and dark that she has never seen before on her sisters face. “Leliana?” She starts to ask, soft and uncertain, reaching out to brush her lips against the hollows of those dark, delicate cheeks, to coax out one of the smiles she remembers so well. But Canaan shifts at her side and Exist’s eyes are drawn to him just as quickly, darker now, deeper as she hurries to wipe some of the truth from them, to tuck away a secret before he has a chance to recognize it in the shadows of her soft smile.
Just in time, too.
She watches him shift to press a kiss to Leliana’s temple and she can feel that truth swimming for the surface of her green eyes, can feel shadows deepening in the hollows of a face that turns quickly away from them. But then he shifts again and it is to close the distance between them, to place a similar kiss against the copper curve of her jaw. “Canaan.” She breathes before she can stop herself, too much weight, too much ache, too much quiet buried in the breathlessness of her whisper as she leans into his touch. He moves closer still, draping his neck across her withers to pull her tight against his chest and she folds into him willingly, readily, easily as she had a dozen times before though somehow this felt different.
It is a relief when Leliana moves to join them, when those lips reach to trace across her forehead and Exist can lean into this too, closing her eyes beneath this moment of piece, nestled so carefully between the woman who has always been her other half and the man who is friend and something more, something harder.
Something that hurts in the quiet of her chest.
I am so happy for you. Leliana murmurs, soft as she has always been and Exist opens her eyes again, reaches out to run her nose along the crest of a bay neck and beneath the soft tangles of red. Thank you, she means to say, or maybe even, me too - and she is happy, loves the weight of them curled inside her, has imagined meeting them a thousand times. But the words that come out instead are so different, another truth, but filled with dark instead of light. “I’m so scared.” She does not, will not, cannot leave the safety of Canaan’s embrace, but she leans for her sister too, burying that beautiful copper face in the crook of a neck made perfectly to hold her. “What if I can’t do this,” she breathes, shattering, finding it too easy to fall apart when there were so many hands reaching to catch her broken pieces, “what if I’m not good for them.”
Like mom, she doesn’t add, but she doesn’t need to because Leliana will understand, maybe even Canaan will too. He had never seen the woman, after all.
Exist